Budget 2017

The Resolution Foundation has crunched the numbers from the OBR Report and the Budget and projects that wages are now looking like they will stay flat for an extraordinary 17 years, reaching pre-Crisis levels only in 2025. That will knock the National Living Wage projected rate down to £8.56 in 2020 if the gloomy prophecy is fulfilled.

Conservative MP Bob Blackman, journalist and author Dawn Foster, who is currently writing a book on the UK housing market, and chairman of the Local Government Association, Lord Porter, discuss the chancellor’s housing announcements.

The one thing public sector workers were hoping for from today’s budget was a pay rise after caps and freezes over the last seven years. There were also calls for dramatic changes to Universal Credit after people had been left for weeks without any money at all.

A joke about cough sweets didn’t sugar the pill – the economic forecasts in Philip Hammond’s second budget this year were much gloomier than those he announced in the spring. The Chancellor admitted that productivity “continues to disappoint” and that meant a sharp slash in the prediction for future growth. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said…

This was not a transformatory Budget but the OBR figures on projected growth do threaten to change things in a big way. A 0.5% cut in trend growth sounds like nothing in particular, but cumulatively it can have a big impact.

Philip Hammond’s U-turn on National Insurance contributions for the self-employed is not just politically humbling for Number 11 but, critics charge, deeply worrying for the future of the public purse.

The Chancellor fends off a furious backlash from his own backbenches, the media and voters after breaking his party’s pre-election pledge not to raise national insurance – no matter how sensible the measure itself might be. Fatima Manji reports.